During my years as a high school teacher, summer vacation was often the time to catch up on the reading I didn't have time for during the school year. My reading list frequently featured books unrelated to education, but I always included a book or two related to my teaching, as long as it was both thought provoking and readable. So I want to suggest some books that I think would be good to check out for this summer. These are my picks.

For Instructional Inspiration

The Dimensions of Engaged Teaching: A Practical Guide for Educators is my pick for summer reading to enhance your instruction. This book is perfect for those of you who, as I do, consider learners' emotions to be one of the priorities in both curriculum and instruction. It's one that makes me want to come out of retirement and have a classroom.

The book grew out of the work of Laura Weaver and Mark Wilding at the PassageWorks Institute, which focuses on helping educators learn how to effectively develop skills and sensitivities that not only reach learners effectively, but also help them develop emotionally. Weaver and Wilding led a six-person writing team to develop what is in some ways almost a guide to putting Parker Palmer's seminal book, The Courage to Teach, into practical action. The five dimensions described are:

Cultivating an open heart

Engaging the self-observer

Being present

Establishing respectful boundaries

Developing emotional capacity

Very readable, well-organized and stimulating, it will make you look forward to the fall and putting many of these ideas into action. This may not be a book for cover-to-cover beach reading, but it is one to have on the shelf in front of you as a frequent reference for instructional ideas.

The engaged teaching website is itself a rich resource, and the writing team members are very accessible and highly focused on supporting teachers. There's a book grant program for schools and teachers.

The sometimes fine line between which kid is the bully and which is the victim

The increasing role of Facebook and other social networking sites

She also does some effective myth busting related to the connection between bullying and suicide, the belief that girls bully more, and the truism that harsh penalties are an effective deterrent.

It is well-researched, beautifully written and filled with insights that can easily lead to more effective responses by schools and families.

One Your Students May Be Reading

Read The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey! This is recommended to keep you in touch with what many of your students will be reading, but it is also a great read for adults. It may be this year's The Hunger Games. With a great first person narrative by Cassie, the young heroine, it is the most original take on an alien invasion that I've read in years. Check it out with a free Kindle sample available from Amazon.

I also want to note that the number of high quality young adult novels keeps increasing, and the line between them and adult literature is becoming increasingly blurred.

Breakthrough Book on Media Literacy

Any of you who regularly follow my blog know that I think media literacy should be a required part of the curriculum in every school. And The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens by Stephen Apkon, with foreword by Martin Scorsese, is the most interesting book on the subject that I've come across in a long time.

The whole book is a great read, but the chapter called "Teaching a New Generation" should be required reading for every teacher.

Two Related Reads for Every Teacher and Administrator

Both of the following books tackle ways of better integrating out-of-school and in-school learning. How do we better connect schools and classrooms to the real world of work and the broader world outside? These books detail both the importance of and paths to successfully doing this.

Leaving to Learn, by Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski, with a foreword by Sir Ken Robinson, focuses on effective ways of strengthening that connection to increase kids' engagement in schools and reduce dropouts.

To See the Big Picture

Although these next books are probably more important for policy-makers on both a local and national level, they are worth a look by teachers and should be read by all administrators.

Improbable Scholars, by David Kirp, focuses on one school district, Union City, New Jersey, to show what's possible when creative thinking and action trumps formulaic responses and trendy reform movements.

Education and Democracy in the 21st Century, by Nel Noddings, continues the author's long history as one of our most eminent educational philosophers and consistently powerful voices for increasing the responsiveness and democratic practices in our schools. This is not light reading, but Noddings' exploration of how schools can and must address all three major domains of life -- home and family, occupational, and civic -- is an important corrective to dominant educational policies.

A Film to Miss and One to See

I usually also nominate some films for teachers, but this year's pickings have been lean. I do have two recommendations, though.

Don't go to see The English Teacher! With Julianne Moore as the lead and a good cast, it seemed promising. But the screenplay of this comedy about an unmarried 40-year-old English teacher is weak, and the film is neither funny nor intelligent.

Thanks for this recommendation Hal! With it I feel as though I've come full circle back to my work in a doctoral program in Humanistic Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970 and as a faculty member in the Confluent Ed program at UC Santa Barbara! Carl Rogers was one of the inspirations for those programs, as was Fritz Perls.

Over forty years later we're working together to try to infuse this practice, based on psychological wisdom, as an antidote to the testing mania.

Those T.S. Eliot lines come to mind. "To return to the place we started from and know it for the first time." Though perhaps we've known it all along.

It is a small world, Mark. That's me! And, yes, the world brings us back home. T.S. Elliot was right. I believe with all the violence in the schools and the emphasis on teaching to the tests, that the time is now ripe again for the person-centered classrooms which empirical studies have shown have so many positive outcomes. Time to revisit the work of Rogers, Aspy, Jeff Cornelius-White with his meta-analysis of person centered teaching, and so many of us including you and others who were at U. Mass. This book by Rogers and I which we began before his death and the research by Tausch in Germany which was replicated with "tutonic thoroughness" in the words of Rogers presents the thorough research supporting person centered methods and research which never had the visibility it deserved. Please do a review! What is your mailing address?
Warm wishes from the past,

I would be very interested in hearing your perception of the connections between the work of Rogers, person-centered methods, & the Free Schools i.e. Summerhill & Sudbury Valley Schools; please feel free to respond on or off-line. Book sounds like a great addition to the work supporting real differentiation & an understanding that the role of school is more than to mold future workers.

I would be very interested in hearing your perception of the connections between the work of Rogers, person-centered methods, & the Free Schools i.e. Summerhill & Sudbury Valley Schools; please feel free to respond on or off-line. Book sounds like a great addition to the work supporting real differentiation & an understanding that the role of school is more than to mold future workers.

Another excellent film is If You Build It--a documentary about using the design principles and process in a course for high school students in rural North Carolina. https://www.facebook.com/StudioHmovie

I haven't read the book yet, so will wait and see its approach.
There are two components for me. One is values, and there I like Rogers values and the basic values underlying many of the early free schools. But the other is the actual approaches, the structures, techniques, curriculum and instruction.
There my commitment is to what one great educator called "the art of the eclectic." I think many of those schools were heavily flawed because they had a pure application of single theories that had all sorts of negative side effects.
So Rogers yes, and Perls, and Bruner, and Gardner, and Sternberg, and the latest people doing research in attachment theory, and.... You get the idea.

Summerhill, which didn't come from Rogers of course, was a lovely dream and there's much to learn from it. but it was also terribly flawed and not good for more than a small group of kids who were well matched to the approach.

I would be interested in what you feel the flaws are? Summerhill and its "offspring" continue to exist and grow in number. Particularly Sudbury Valley Schools, alongside the Jefferson County Open School, have done a nice job of tracking graduates to document their alumni accomplishments. These schools have now crossed the spectrum demographically as well, my own research is in the process of examining a particularly urban Free School, still too early for any definitive conclusions from my research..

May I suggest another? Dear God, Welcome Back to School.
This book focuses on encouraging teachers and other public school employees with their walk with God through public schools. It's easy to read but can be a challenge to live out...worth every moment!